Time to farewell the floppy and say thanks for the flash memory

It is safe now to throw out all your floppy disks and bid farewell to the venerable floppy disk drive.

The 3.5-inch disk drive has been surprisingly hard to kill. Originally, one diskette could contain only 1.44 megabytes of data, and when Iomega introduced the 100MB Zip drive, it did nearly kill the floppy. Zip drives became so popular they were integrated in personal computers from Dell and NEC.

Then, Panasonic introduced the super floppy with a capacity of 120MB that gave the technology a second lease of life.

But both the Zip and the super floppy cannot cope with the kind of data capacities we deal with daily - from e-mail to PowerPoint presentations to huge PDF and Jpeg files. That is why Apple took the first step and did not build a floppy disk drive in its iMac.

Like many people I know, I have survived the past four years without a floppy drive. With a broadband Internet connection, I can forward all the files I need to work on to an online destination such as Yahoo! briefcase. To back up my hard drive, there are a multitude of options from Iomega one-gigabyte Jaz drives to external hard disk drives that go up to 50GB.

Most people, however, might still need or prefer a high-capacity removable storage option. A CD-RW drive is still a good option even though combo drives that record on CDs as well as DVDs are slowly becoming a standard in top-end PCs. Hewlett-Packard (HP) two weeks ago in Hong Kong launched internal and external DVD+RW, DVD+R and CD-RW combo drives. You can connect the drive to your PC via USB or IEEE 1394. The internal drive costs HK$3,999 and the external HK$4,999.

Now, we all know that the DVD recording standards battle is making everyone a little confused about the differences and whether they should wait for a while longer or bite the bullet. I say bite the bullet.